Non Lating Languages Support Page

Our goal

RockBox should be totally portable for every language there is. Unicode support was a crucial step in that direction.

The problematic screens

There are a few screens that uses rockbox's internal font to display latin strings:

Pitch screen

Recording screen

Equalizer screen

Quickmenu screen

Buttonbar (recorder)

The Quick Fix:

currently, we have 58 LANG_SYSFONT_ strings added at the end of every language file.
On those screens rockbox's internal font is currently used. Because only latin characters are available in the internal font, all sysfont strings must currently be latin, or they will display as non-character squares.

for Translators

If while using your own language translation you can't see real characters at either one of the screens mentioned,
edit your language file while only using Latin characters. You can use the original english word.
You might want to use LangFiles to learn more about editing language files.

for developers

Please avoid using rockbox's internal font.
If you must, use the appropriate LANG_SYSFONT_ phrase id, so it would be easy to track down later.

The Long term solution:

Migrate all screens to use the user selected font. Using the LANG_SYSFONT_ strings is only a temporary fix: It takes memory to have double language strings around, And the outcome